“The Slaves Were Happy”: High School Latin and the Horrors of Classical Studies
Dispatches from the Front Lines
The most promising of my former Latin students recently told me that she regretted that we did not spend more time discussing the social, cultural, and historical legacy of the ancient world. As with all good criticism, this cut deep because I acknowledged the justice of the reproach. She noted that, for all of the time that we spent reading Latin texts, the class had never really spent much time discussing in depth such issues as the brutality of war, the treatment of women, and the experience of slaves.
For all of the lofty sublimity which can potentially be found in Classical literature, there is underlying it a legacy of horror and abuse which is not infrequently discussed in college lecture halls, but can be a source of strain, vexation, and even professional peril in a high school Latin classroom. Classicists often indulge themselves in bouts of self-congratulation about teaching humanities, and take presumptive credit for the supposedly humanizing influence which they have. Yet, as a high school Latin teacher, I confess that I have singularly failed in this (perhaps totally unrealistic) aim.
A typical Latin IV class in America will spend roughly half of the school year reading Julius Caesar, whose Commentaries on the Gallic Wars have long been a fixture of Latin classes. Caesar provides a sure and safe introduction to the lucid Latin laid out in grammar books, but it is otherwise hard to engage students with Caesar’s text on a meaningful level. Caesar gives an impersonal eyewitness account of a war which happened more than 2,000 years ago. For some students this very historical distance seems to mitigate the cruelty of the entire endeavor. In fact, more than a few students have told me that they received the whole work as though it were fictional: “It just doesn’t feel like it even happened.”
The impersonal/objective authorial voice of Caesar contributes to this reception. Consider his note, after defeating the Veneti in Book III of the Gallic Wars, “And so, with the whole senate having been killed, he sold the rest into slavery” (Itaque omni senatu necato reliquos sub corona vendidit). One cold sentence contains in eight words all of the suffering of slaughter and slavery, but it is used today primarily as a convenient spot to review the ablative absolute. This reading cannot have a humanizing effect if we are simply grooming the next generation of cloistered pedants. Caesar’s value as an exemplar of clear and conveniently grammaticized Latin is indisputable; yet, how can we use the horrors which Caesar describes as a tool to inform our common humanity?
I cite Caesar as a case study here only because he makes up half of the required reading for the AP Latin course, and is consequently (and unfortunately) an inevitable part of high school Latin. But no student enrolls to read Caesar; they want mythology! Sanitized versions of Greek and Roman myth have captured the minds of children for ages, and though I occasionally find it challenging (yet still entertaining) to dispel some of the notions which they have picked up from the Percy Jackson series, I find it even harder in a high school setting to be entirely frank and honest about the irrational, dark, and terrifying nature of myth.
I try my best to make mythology safely presentable to a group of teenagers in a culture which, for all of its hypersexualized media, still retains a semi-Puritanical aversion to the open discussion of sex. I have lived my entire life either in Texas or the south, where abstinence is the chief virtue, and silence on the details of the subject is considered the safest way to foster the appropriate attitude. Any television station would sooner show bombings than breasts.
As such, any teacher who wishes to avoid a scandal will try as much as possible to avoid any mention of human sexuality. I know that this avoidance is impossible in English literature classes, and English teachers have managed to find a way to discuss these things, but English is a required subject which does not (yet) face the constant threat of outright elimination from the high school curriculum. So, in order to avoid the subject, I employ vagueness and silly circumlocution such as “nocturnal congress” (thanks, Livy!) or “Zeus visited Leda as a swan, and through some mysterious process she conceived two children.” Most students roll their eyes and say, “Yeah, sure, mysterious process” and laugh because, despite social taboos and institutional restrictions, they already know it all.
Yet some perceptive students know that even if I were to have said explicitly “they had sex,” I would have been hedging. When presenting the myth (with all of the vagueness and circumlocution) one day, a student asked, “Actually, didn’t Zeus rape her?” Here is a pedagogical challenge trickier than anything in Caesar. I acknowledged that this was indeed what had happened, and asked the students to consider what remains unexpressed in many myths, as in many narratives more generally. This is a problem which is more immediate and relevant to them in a country where rape and other forms of sexual violence are often elided, downplayed, or ignored, especially on the college campuses where they will soon find themselves. I suspect that this is because of the sexual aspect of sexual violence, given that honest engagement with nonsexual violence does not prompt the same reaction.
Many of these concerns, in a strict sense, lie outside the purview of the Latin classroom — but that does not mean that it should be entirely ignored or sidestepped when it is manifestly a part of the stories which serve as the foundation for all ancient literature. Unlike a college lecture hall, even the most expansive high school has fairly narrow limits, beyond which the teacher treads at his peril. But by glossing entirely over the issue of sexual violence in these stories which are so deeply entrenched in our cultural heritage, we simply reinforce the notion that uncomfortable and shame-faced silence are the proper response to it. We must “sanitize” the myths to present them as a part of the curriculum; but by taking this sanitization to the extreme, we risk becoming complicit in a culture that, through a complex web of social taboos and received narrative, silences its victims.
Regional mores differ widely, and the extent to which such discussions may pose a potential professional risk will vary by state, type of institution, and even individual campus culture. One friend told me that her English class read Joyce’s Ulysses at a public high school here in town. I imagine that this would go over poorly in my school, but I also know of other schools only thirty minutes away where the teacher would be summarily fired for teaching it.
I have no recommendations on this point, because each teacher will know how far these problems can be explored at their own schools. Yet, while still remaining well within institutional and curricular limits, we can at least try to acknowledge these horrors for what they are — not only a dark legacy of antiquity, but also problems which continue to plague us today. In the classroom, we cannot of course be entirely honest about the horror of sexual violence latent in many myths, but we need not retreat into flagrant dishonesty or disavowal, either.
Honest confrontation of the darker legacies of the ancient world is also greatly complicated by many of the introductory textbooks used in Latin classes. Many students in Texas do not take Latin beyond the second year, so these introductory textbooks will form the bulk of their reading on the ancient world in school. I do not mean to address the pedagogical side of various textbooks, but some of them take a rather jocular and trivializing stance toward violence, abuse, and especially slavery. One need look no further than the Cambridge Latin Course, one of the most widely-used introductory Latin texts in American high schools.
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The Cambridge Latin Course teaches Latin through a continuous narrative tale set in the latter half of the 1st century CE over the course of four books. Students love the characters in the Cambridge Latin Course, most notably Grumio, the somnolent kitchen slave who is depicted living a perfectly happy life in the Roman villa; there is no hint that Grumio could ever be subject to arbitrary beating, crucifixion, or torture. Grumio has developed something of a cult following among those who learned Latin with the CLC, yet I have never heard anyone ask about or acknowledge the fact that he was not living a life of his own choosing. While it is true that the CLC presents a brief historical sketch about slavery in the ancient world, it is little more than a sanitized cultural note, and does little to dispel the impressions created by the story itself.
At one point in the first book of the CLC, the paterfamilias Caecilius purchases a beautiful slave girl, and all of the students giggle as they translate Melissa Grumionem delectat with “Melissa pleasures Grumio,” instead of using the more natural “pleases” or “delights.” The joke artfully sidesteps the serious issues: for all we actually know, Caecilius purchased Melissa with the intention of violating her, and at any rate the text does make clear what all of the men in the household are thinking when she arrives.
Later, in the second book of the CLC, a man named Salvius elicits a laugh from students whenever he asks whether a slave is sick — the running gag here is that Salvius does not want to keep a sick slave, and so will send him to the executioners. Students are encouraged to laugh at a situation in which humans are treated as property and sent off to die. I appreciate that the CLC attempts to develop a narrative to keep students’ attention engaged, but it is hard to address the problem of slavery seriously after it has been turned into a recurring punchline.
The treatment of slavery in the CLC (and in other introductory books) seems consciously designed to aid in the reception of authentic texts. You can read many works of ancient literature with no real understanding of the experience of Roman slaves and still understand them as literature, but once the Latin student cracks open a volume of Plautus or Terence, slaves feature prominently throughout. In that sense, books like the CLC prepare students to encounter slaves in accounts of Roman life, but they also pave the way for students to receive these works as the Romans did by giving them the “Roman attitude” — viewing the slaves as a comedic foil, and taking their suffering as a joke. We as Classicists should admit that the very notion of “recovered reception” is absurd and problematic. We can try our best to set aside modern notions and preconceptions when reading ancient works, while learning as much as we can about their cultural context, but a Roman never had to do either of these things.
We are observers and preservers of things past, but will never be reborn Romans. It also seems less than laudable to try to recapture and renew the Roman attitude toward the people whom they considered merely in the light of occasionally inconvenient property. My students often ask whether I wish that I could be transported back to ancient Greece or Rome, and I answer emphatically no. Of course, the antiquarian’s favorite hobby is to decry modern civilization (and this practice itself goes all the way back to Hesiod, or perhaps Nestor in Homer), but I doubt that any Classicist would actually claim that life was on the whole better in ancient Greece or Rome than it is today. The Classics are objects for study, not revivification.
In the Republic, Plato’s Socrates criticizes Homer and Hesiod extensively for portraying the gods in particular as less than morally exemplary. Their poems, however, made up the educational curriculum of the day, and Plato has Socrates suggest that an education containing unsavory exempla would be morally damaging. The argument for banning poems like the Odyssey from the ideal state was largely based on a fear of moral contamination. It is obvious enough that we do not live in Plato’s republic, and in many schools students still read the poets along with other works of ancient literature, but for all practical purposes many of the morally controversial issues are either omitted from the reading or are avoided in discussions of the text.
In some regions of the country, various social forces have brought about something similar to the aim which Plato wished to achieve through deliberate social engineering — excluding morally questionable content from the curriculum. If the aim was to produce more moral people, then the project has been a spectacular failure. Indeed, by intentionally ignoring the morally problematic aspects of ancient literature and civilization, we have likely impaired our students’ ability to think about and confront these issues responsibly.
High school Latin is for many students their first opportunity to study the ancient world in depth. The study of Classics has meant the world to me for more than a decade now, and I want students to share that love, but I also want them to love it not because they are unaware of or indifferent to its darker side. Classics is not unique in this way — all of human history and achievement is in some way undergirded by or associated with a dark legacy. I know that most of them will forget all the Latin they learned, but just as it was the first, it may also be the last time that they study the ancient world in any committed way.
A much larger and far more diverse group of students take Latin in high school than study Classics in college. If we leave them with the impression that Classics consists of little more than reams of grammatical constructions learned through a series of comics which trivialize rape and slavery, ultimately culminating in the ability to read a callous account of self-aggrandizing genocide, then we have failed. I know that I have failed repeatedly, and confess that I have, in my haste to prepare students for an ill-conceived standardized test, trivialized and sidestepped serious issues.
One may readily ask why a body of history and literature containing so much that is awful should still be the subject of extensive study at all. To butcher Horace: mutatis nominibus, de nobis fabula narratur — change the names, and the story is about us. What I have called the horrors of Classics are really no different from the horrors that confront us today. One may as well ask why we do not simply neglect or destroy physical relics like the Parthenon or the Pyramids, which are in their own ways monuments to forced labor, oppressive social systems, and human suffering. Yet, we ourselves have not ascended to a Utopian pinnacle from which we can glibly talk about the manifest moral inferiority of the ancients.
I am not advocating that we turn our classrooms into pure seminars on social justice, but we ought to do our best to foster engagement and discussion which do not minimize the horrors of antiquity. One does not find a cure for disease by forgetting or ignoring it, and so too with the sickness of the soul: only through diligent study of all that is worst in humanity can we hope to cure it. As Aeneas gazes at the portrayal of the Trojan War outside Juno’s temple at the end of Book I of the Aeneid, he says, “There are the tears of the world (sunt lacrimae rerum).” The tears of the world are there in the Classics, and a humane education is not complete if we do not draw them forth.
Erik is a Latin teacher at a public high school in Texas. He is a regular contributor to the blog Sententiae Antiquae, and is the editor (with Joel Christensen) of the forthcoming edition of The Homeric Battle of the Frogs and Mice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
